The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, a bulldog on the DOJ/Fox News secret subpoena story, reports that the effort by the Justice Department to obtain the controversial court order was arduous, contentious and unsuccessful until finally a third judge acquiesced.

Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received– it’s all in databases that are increasingly linked and correlated.

Still, there’s a lot of personal information the government can’t collect. Either they’re prohibited by law from asking without probable cause and a judicial order, or they simply have no cost-effective way to collect it. But the government has figured out how to get around the laws, and collect personal data that has been historically denied to them: ask corporate America for it….

Sometimes they simply purchase it, just as any other company might. Sometimes they can get it for free, from corporations that want to stay on the government’s good side.

And there are companies aplenty that are willing to outright give it up to the Obama Administration.

Barack Obama’s re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before….

The centralized nature of the database may raise privacy issues as the election cycle progresses. Jeff Chester of the digital advertising watchdog Center for Digital Democracy, which has been calling for regulators to review the growth of digital marketing in politics, said that “this is beyond J. Edgar Hoover’s dream.

“In its rush to exploit the power of digital data to win re-election, the Obama campaign appears to be ignoring the ethical and moral implications.”

(Former Google Director of Global Public Policy cum White House official) McLaughlin was cited for two kinds of actions: using a personal email account for some professional email exchanges and for violating restrictions on contacts with Google, his former employer.

Most notable among the latter were a pair of conversations with the Director of U.S. Public Policy for Google about mobilizing Google’s resources to respond to negative press mentions.

Those breaches, according to a memo by OSTP Director John Holdren, “implicated” the Federal Records Act….

In other words, McLaughlin was using Google resources – Search manipulations? Your data? – to help the Administration spin away their negative-ness.

Everyone knows Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, is a big Obama backer. Now he has assembled a team of “former” (Obama campaign outfit) Organizing For Action data geeks to use Big Data to help Democrats.

Oh, sure, they’re pretending it is some grand effort to help companies and non-profits but this is how the left operates. It’s the Soros model. Pretend your investing in social welfare projects that just so happen to push only leftist agendas. This new company, Civis Analytics, will be no different.

Wait – the Left says that the IRS scandal shows that only Conservative groups abuse this project model.

Obviously not. Schmidt is taking the Obama Administration Abuse-of-Data model – and setting it up so that every Democrat can replicate and have at it.

We the Peasants have never been less alone. Big Brother is more and more in our computers, our homes, our heads – and will now thanks to this “social welfare” project be able to invite in his entire oversized Family.